26/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

“The atoms of matter appear to be manufactured articles, and therefore have a substratum; as they possess energy, energy must have been in existence prior to the existence of the first atom. And as the mechanical activities, such as physical science at present has to do with, show to us the utter impossibility of constructing a single one, it leaves us with the persuasion that the energy in existence before matter,

was not of the mechanical kind. For that kind is what we have to deal with at present. Choice is exhibited in such disposition of the energy as is displayed in the creation of matter.” Science has already proven the material world, as it was formerly conceived to exist, to be a myth. Forces are no longer regarded as objective entities. Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, sound, and even matter itself, are now treated as modes of manifestation of a universal energy.

When we attempt to analyze the forms of our outer order, in an ascending scale, we at first recognize the earth as a complete unit of itself. But we soon find that this unit represents a fraction of a larger unit, our solar system.

Again, this solar system is a fraction of a still greater unit or system. We may gain the very faintest sort of appreciation of the distances involved in these calculations by considering the fact that light, traveling at the approximate rate of 190,000 miles per second, requires over three years to reach the earth from the member of this system nearest our sun.

Even these figures are utterly incomprehensible; yet the most powerful telescopes reveal the existence of at least millions of similar solar units, organized into systems extending out, out, out, into infinite space, and finally disappearing beyond the range of any mechanical device yet invented to aid the eye in its search.

Supposing it were possible to continue increasing the power of the telescope indefinitely, how much nearer, in all probability, would we be to a final solution of the problem of this natural order? It is even more difficult to conceive that an ultimate boundary to it exists in space than it is to simply imagine it to be infinite in extent.

Any attempt to encompass the material universe with our thought, or even to estimate its magnitude, then, gives us at the very outset a hint of the possible existence of an unlimited number of worlds. And, after all, is it more difficult to account for such a universe than it is to account for the existence of any external universe at all?